Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S4 Ep 8 – The Laws of Inferno Dynamics

It’s the mid-season finale, guys, and this episode is finale-worthy.

So glad this finally happened! They’re adorable.

Everything so far has been building to this moment. New super-villain Eli is holed up in some warehouse, creating a terribly dangerous power source/weapon. Basically all of SHIELD is gathered to try to stop him. That includes Robbie and Daisy, though the Director is still not pleased about that. He’s even less pleased when Coulson decides to tell him about Aida’s true nature. Meanwhile, Yo-Yo is also not happy with Mack. So much tension, everyone! Can’t we all relax? Not really, since a bad guy is about to destroy the world or at least LA with his homemade nuclear bomb thing. See, Eli has progressed to making plutonium with his abilities. Also he decides to stab his own nephew with those carbon spear things. That means Ghost Rider is trapped, unable to defeat him at first. Boo!

But Fitz, busy scanning the situation in the jet with Simmons, refuses to believe Eli is really creating matter from nothing. And he’s right (again): it turns out the evil engineer is actually stealing energy from another dimension to power his “creations”. Every time he does this, he widens a rift that will be really bad news. Rifts usually are, of course. But when Coulson goes in to tell Eli this, Eli doesn’t want to believe him. As Coulson says, “You’re too drunk on power. Or drinking your own Kool-Aid. Or drunk on Power-Ade, or something.” I heart Coulson.

Really, though, Coulson was just buying everyone time to put their plan into action. Daisy uses her newly refined abilities to try to calm the earthquakes Eli is causing. Fitz, Simmons, Radcliffe, and Aida put together the equipment that will trap Eli. Mace, Mack, and May fight off Eli’s goons. And Yo-Yo uses her ability to attach a magnet to Eli, as well as doing that arranging-the-room-at-super-speed thing that I love to watch so much. Together, they bring down Eli – but only because Robbie apparently sacrifices himself to keep Eli from crawling out of the rift box thing.

I assume we’ll be seeing more of this super-suit. It is super-awesome.

Now the aftermath. Mace sets it up so that Daisy gets a lot of the credit in the media for stopping Eli, and says she was an undercover SHIELD agent all along. That means Agent Johnson is free to really join again. Talking with Coulson, she decides she will. Good! We’ve missed you being non-mopey and part of the team, Quake. Coulson also hints that Robbie probably isn’t dead. I agree. That would be way too anticlimactic for Ghost Rider. The Director orders Radcliffe to only work on all of his android stuff under proper SHIELD supervision. I get the impression Radcliffe isn’t thrilled by this, but he doesn’t want to destroy Aida, either. So he’ll go with it.

However, Aida herself has been hiding some huge secrets. See, earlier in the ep, Mace sent May off to bring Aida to the warehouse site. Before she left, she complained to Coulson that she got the boring job. Coulson promised they’d finally open that bottle of whatever expensive alcohol they’ve been saving after everything. And if that wasn’t a gigantic clue that something terrible was going to happen to May… Because it turns out Aida is keeping May unconscious in Radcliffe’s lab. The May that was fighting earlier – and that now is sharing the booze of sweet friendship/love with Coulson! – is an LMD. Oh nooooooo!

And that’s where we’ll wait, until the show comes back in the new year. What did you think? Let us know in the comments!